Chinese characters are one of the oldest, most widely used and most popular characters in the world. The creation and application of Chinese characters not only promote the development of Chinese culture, but also have a profound impact on the development of world culture. Influence.
In places such as the Banpo ruins about 6,000 years ago, more than 50 kinds of inscribed symbols have appeared. They are neat and standardized, have certain regularity, and have the characteristics of simple writing. Scholars believe that this may be the germ of Chinese characters.
It was the Shang Dynasty in the 16th century BC that Chinese characters became a systematic writing system. Archeology has confirmed that in the early Shang Dynasty, Chinese civilization had developed to a very high level, and one of its main features was the emergence of oracle bone inscriptions. Oracle bone inscriptions are ancient writings carved on tortoise shells and animal bones. In the Shang Dynasty, kings had to perform divination before doing anything, and oracle bones were used for divination.
Oracle bones must be processed before use. First, the flesh and blood on the oracle bones were removed, and then they were sawed and smoothed. Then, use a tool to drill a recess on the inner surface of the armor or the back of the animal bone. The arrangement of these notches is orderly. The fortune teller, or wizard, would carve his or her name, the date of the divination, and the questions to be asked on the oracle bones, and then burn the indentations on the oracle bones with a stick of fire. The cracks that appear when these dents are heated are called "trails". The wizard analyzed the direction of these cracks, obtained the results of the divination, and engraved whether the divination came true on the oracle bones. After the divination was fulfilled, these oracle bones with inscriptions were preserved as official records.
Currently, archaeologists have unearthed more than 160,000 oracle bones. Some of them are complete, and some are just fragments without written records. According to statistics, the total number of various characters on all these oracle bones is more than 4,000, of which about 3,000 have been verified and studied by scholars. Among the more than 3,000 characters, scholars have unanimously interpreted more than 1,000 characters. The rest are either uninterpretable or scholars are deeply divided. Despite this, through these more than a thousand words, people can already roughly understand the political, economic, cultural and other aspects of the Shang Dynasty. Oracle bone inscriptions are a mature and systematic writing that laid the foundation for the development of Chinese characters in later generations. Since then, Chinese characters have gone through copper inscriptions (bronze inscriptions), small seal script, official script, regular script and other forms, and are still in use today.
The evolution of Chinese characters is a process of gradual standardization and stabilization of Chinese character glyphs and fonts. Xiaozhuan fixed the number of strokes of each character; official script formed a new stroke system, and the character shape gradually became a flat square; after the birth of regular script, the shape and font of Chinese characters became stable: determined? Horizontal, vertical, apostrophe, dot, 捺, The basic strokes of picking and folding have been further standardized, and the stroke number and stroke order of each character have also been fixed. For more than a thousand years, regular script has been the standard Chinese script.
Chinese characters are an ideographic writing system based on pictograms and with picophonetic characters as the main body. There are about 10,000 Chinese characters in total, of which about 3,000 are the most commonly used. These more than 3,000 Chinese characters can be formed into an infinite number of phrases, and then into various sentences. After the emergence of Chinese characters, it had a profound impact on neighboring countries. The characters of Japan, Vietnam, North Korea and other countries are all created on the basis of Chinese characters.
The evolution of Chinese characters
Chinese characters are constantly developing and evolving. Their evolution includes the evolution of character structure and the evolution of character form. They are not only related to the times, but also to countries or regions, countries, and regions. Differences in text usage, writing materials, etc. are all relevant. The shape of Chinese characters refers to the writing shape of the characters, which is commonly referred to as fonts.
People are generally accustomed to call the characters written in fonts from the emergence of Chinese characters to Xiaozhuan as ancient characters; the characters written in fonts after Qin Lishu are collectively called modern characters.
1. Oracle bone inscriptions:
Oracle bone inscriptions are characters engraved on the bones of tortoise shells that are generally used for divination. Oracle bone deed symbols have been discovered as far back as the Neolithic period at the Jiahu site in Wuyang County, Henan Province, and the Huayuan Village site in Chang'an County, Shaanxi Province during the Longshan Culture period. There are about 100,000 oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty that have been discovered. The total number of oracle bones with characters is about 62,000, and 3,978 single characters have been sorted out. There are more than 900 oracle bone inscriptions that can be read and confirmed, and most of them are common characters; there are more than 3,000 oracle bones that cannot be read and confirmed, and most of them are names of people, places, clans and other specialized names.
2. Bronze inscriptions:
Bronze inscriptions refer to the characters carved on various bronze vessels in the pre-Qin period. The ancients called copper gold, so this name is actually the provincial name of the bronze inscription. Among the bronzes, bells are the most popular musical instruments and tripods are the most ritual vessels. Bells and tripods are generally used to represent ancient bronzes, so they are also called bells and tripods. Among them, the concave ones are called Yin characters, also called models, which means empty; while the raised ones are called Yang characters, also called Shi, which means signs. Collectively known as recognition. So far, more than 8,000 pre-Qin bronzes with inscriptions have been unearthed. There are more than 3,000 unique single characters on them, and the reader can read about 1,800 characters.
3. Big Seal Script:
Big Seal Script refers to the Qin characters of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. The upper part inherits the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty and the lower part adopts the small seal script. The strokes become more linear and the characters gradually become finalized.
4. Small Seal Script:
Small Seal Script refers to the Qin characters commonly used after Qin Shihuang unified China. It is also called Qin Seal Script and is the symmetry of Big Seal Script. After Qin Shihuang annexed the six kingdoms, he carried out a series of reforms in order to consolidate political unification. One of them was the unification of characters to change the chaotic situation of heterogeneous characters during the Warring States Period. The form of small seal script is stereotyped, and each character generally only has a unified writing method, abolishing many old odd-shaped characters in ancient characters. Fonts are further symbolized. The glyphs are developing in the direction of simplification.
5. Official script:
Official script is a font that is simpler and easier to write than seal script. This font was originally used exclusively by jailers in the Qin Dynasty, so it was called official script. The form of Chinese characters in official script is fully symbolic, that is, the pictographic elements of ancient Chinese characters are completely abandoned, turning the characters into symbols purely composed of strokes, losing the original pictographic and symbolic functions. For example: bird, horse, fish, swallow, Xiaozhuan has more or less pictographic meaning, while official script changes the tails of fish and swallows and the feet and tails of birds and horses to four points, so that the original characters can no longer be seen. Complete stroke transformation, that is, disbanding the seal script, changing the rounded strokes into square or truncated strokes, decomposing the character shape into an accumulation of several basic strokes, and gradually forming dots, horizontal strokes, straight strokes, curved strokes, left strokes, strokes, picks, hooks, etc. Several strokes.
6. Cursive script:
Cursive script is a modern font produced for the convenience of writing. The word "草" in cursive script means sloppy. There are three common cursive scripts: Zhangcao, Jincao and Kuangcao.
Because cursive script is difficult to write and read, it is inconvenient to use and spread. In addition, it destroys the structural system of Chinese characters to a considerable extent, making it lose its communicative role. Therefore, it has always been an auxiliary font and cannot be used officially. , only works of art for people to appreciate.
Because the strokes of cursive script are simpler than other fonts, it had a great influence on the subsequent simplification of Chinese characters. Among the simplified characters used today, there are many variations of cursive script and regular script. It can be seen that cursive script still has certain progressive significance in the development of Chinese characters.
7. Running script:
Running script is a font between regular script and cursive script. It was produced in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and became popular in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. To this day, it is still the most widely used handwriting for daily letter writing, recording, and drafting manuscripts.
The characteristics of running script are informal regular script, continuous cursive strokes, and independent characters. Seal script, official script, regular script, and cursive script all have certain rules, but running script does not have certain rules. If the writing is more disciplined and has many regular script elements, it is called Xingkai or Zhenxing; if the writing is more indulgent and has many cursive script elements, it is called Xingcao or Caoxing. Wang Xizhi, a native of Jin Dynasty, has been regarded as the sage of calligraphy by successive dynasties, and his "Lanting Preface" is recognized as the best running script in the world.
8. Regular script:
Regular script is a font that evolved from Han Li through simplified provinces. Its original name was Zhengshu or Zhenshu, but it was renamed to its current name after the Tang Dynasty. Kai refers to French style, which means that the specifications are neat and can serve as a model.
People mostly believe that the regular script sprouted in the late Western Han Dynasty. The Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties were the stage where regular script gradually matured and official script gradually disappeared. As for the current regular script, its style is generally based on the calligraphy of the Tang Dynasty. The regular script of the Tang Dynasty, as laid down by the works of the poets, completely eliminated the remaining official script in the regular script of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, so the regular script of the Tang Dynasty was fully mature.
The main characteristics of regular script are its square shape, straight horizontal and vertical lines, and clear strokes.
The structure of regular script is basically the same as that of Han official script, except that some characters in regular script are simpler than Han official script. Some official script still retains a little bit of the structure and strokes of seal script, but there is no such thing in regular script. The main difference between the two lies in the different stroke shapes. The long and horizontal strokes of Han Li have a ripple effect, while those of regular script do not. The long horizontal strokes and back strokes of Han Li have to be raised at the end, while those of regular script do not.